I’m glad some gentle rain from heaven has been falling on the place beneath.
But I know that my country cousins won’t be satisfied with the falls until their livestock start coming from the paddocks two by two and standing around the trailer boat.
Last week my country cousins rang me with one of those rural discourses which they think is necessary for this slothful denizen of suburbia, cocooned in ignorance and with a cultural range bounded by the fishing notes and the menu of the local Chinese takeaway.
I could tell when my country cousins came on the phone that it was rural worry time and that the month of May was not merry and that they were ready to discuss blocking weather highs and lows that slipped away to the south east and weakened.
I weakened a bit myself when they rang.
I knew that they were staring out the window at the moonlit pastures that hadn’t germinated and at ranges over which no cloud crept and that they held the strong view that if there was any moisture about, it was as shy as a tax cut.
In fact, I had been admiring the splendour of the autumn moon through my window as it peered through the tangle of branches and around the corner of the untidy pine trees that mark our house. Autumn moons are beautiful to the casual beholder but as most people’s eyes are full of videos and violence one doesn’t get to see them much.
But the countrysider whose ground is growing colder and whose land isn’t worked up and who is talking about shorter growing seasons isn’t all that romantic on a clear autumn night and is apt to get into land taxes and vegetation clearing.
Or so I learnt on my telephone in the light of the autumn moon.
Excalibur, the tractor, my country cousins said, was so finely tuned that its engine started automatically when someone flushed the toilet so rain-orientated and seeding; sagacious was this motivated mammoth.
It’s no fun waiting for rain, they said and I said I knew that and I couldn’t think of anything by way of comfort. I had already missed half of The Jewel in the Crown because I knew that all my country home cooking and trailerboating to Port Broughton would be in jeopardy if I didn’t sympathise and listen and agonise why the West Australians were always having occasional showers and why Sydney, that scintillating bawd, was always being deluged and even Alice Springs was overcast with patchy rain.
Why was it? they asked huffily. It was time for some computer in the clouds, some satellite that chased the cloud patterns around the earth and parked them neatly over the needy areas. Make rain, not war, my country cousins said.
They had heard I was retiring soon and wasn’t that a relief for the English language and they supposed the old Torana and I would be coming into view on the road above, the top paddock about lunch time. I would be admiring everything as I usually did, crawling and grovelling for new scones and not able to tell wheat from oats.
I didn’t say during this confessional that I would also be eardrummed about barley moisture and silo facilities, about bounties and bonuses, about departmental agricultural eggheads, about marketing mayhem and calamitous Canberra.
I knew that talking was good for the rural soul and that they had to ring someone and that the edgy tightrope of opening rains, if I may mix a rural metaphor, made people ring up and pour it all out into some old ear whose owner would hear them out because sooner or later he and the old Torana would come creeping along the road above the top paddock about lunch time.
My wife called that I was missing The Jewel in the Crown and the rape scene had been replaced by the brutal beating scene and what an atmosphere. The moon rode white and high through the window and the night wind loafed about picking up leaves but never a stick of moisture.
My country cousins said that we’d better get something in the next week or so or they were coming down to burn and loot the Bureau of Meteorology, nullify Aussat and place a banana skin on the runway of the Space Shuttle. So much for technology, they sniffed. So much for predictions and patterns.
They gave me an awful picture of Excalibur juggernauting down the Main North Road flattening the takeaways and reducing Parliament House to whimpering rubble.
Of course I was sympathetic and still am. My country cousins get pretty toey when the opening rains are late. So strive on, Keith Martyn. Work your wonders, Jane Reilly. Give us word of the Wet, I pray you.
For one thing is certain: the old Torana and I won’t be creeping along the road above the top pad dock until the dreaded Excalibur and its brood are sowing the seed and the earth is rain-kissed and mud-mothered.
Then and only then will we call for new scones and country farm eggs. Meanwhile I hope that someone has videotaped The Jewel in the Crown.
Max Fatchen